SOL March 22: Defective Product, Defective Me

Yesterday a lightbulb I bought a month ago blew out. And when I tried to replace two ink cartridges on my printer, one cartridge was “not recognized” by the printer. Since I bought both products from local stores, I waited until a weekday to make my returns.

            There was no problem at the hardware store were I’d gotten the bulb. I was asked for my receipt, which I no longer had, because I shred credit card slips after I get my statement and check everything, especially since I’ve been totally off cash since the pandemic started. When I started to show the manager my credit card statement, he waved it away and said he’d take my word. One down, two to go.

            The stationery store was a totally different matter. First, the young man behind the counter (a son of the family that owns the shop) said they don’t carry those anymore. I insisted that I’d gotten the package of three colors from them a while ago but not too long ago, but he said no. I forget how long it took before he finally said they didn’t carry any ink cartridges at all and hadn’t for over a year; their supplier just doesn’t carry ink cartridges anymore. Then his co-worker (a brother?) said I couldn’t have gotten the cartridge I had in my hand from the package I had in the other hand because the cartridge was 222 and the box was 702.

            A hazy memory surfaced: I’d had to get my ink cartridges from another stationery shop in the neighborhood the last time I needed a replacement because the closer shop didn’t have the cartridges i needed (though I don’t think I was told then that their supplier just wasn’t carrying ink cartridges at all). In that earlier episode, the clerk at the further away store sold me a 702XL, which I didn’t notice until I started to install it and saw it was much bigger than the usual cartridge.

            Now I was thoroughly confused. Where had the 222 cartridge I’d apparently been trying to use as a replacement come from? I still have no idea. But at the other stationery store, the clerk again tried to sell me another 702XL, and when I objected he said XL means extra ink. More ink because it’s bigger, I said. “It won’t fit in my printer.” So I still have no magenta cartridge and can’t print.

            I’ll have to order online, which I hate doing. I’d much rather shop at brick-and-mortar stores. However, I have now taped a note to my printer that the first stationery store no longer carries printer cartridges, so I hope I don’t forget that again.

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I’m participating in the 14th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 22 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

SOL20: Perseverance aka Stubbornness

            Some people call it knocking your head against a stone wall. Keeping after something over and over even if you don’t get it. Some people call it stubbornness. But take the same behavior and (eventually) get results, and suddenly it becomes perseverance.

            After my husband died, I decided I didn’t need two telephones, a landline as well as a cellphone. And my flip phone was feeling more and more burdensome. I wanted a smartphone, with its connection to the Internet and e-mail and easy-to-type texts. But I didn’t want to change my phone number.

            I knew that it was possible to transfer a landline number to a smartphone, a friend had done it. So my daughter added me to her account, which enabled her to get a new smartphone, which she graciously let me have, and I called both my new phone company and my old phone company to request the number to be transferred. At first each one said to call the other one to start, but eventually they both said transfer was made.

            But it wasn’t. First, calls to the old number from my flip phone rang only on the old phone. Then calls to the old number rang nowhere; the old phone was shut off, but the new phone wasn’t receiving calls. The text function seemed to be working, although it was weeks before I learned that what I thought were texts (which run the phone service) were actually IMs (iPhones can text directly to other iPhones, but no other phones).

            Two months went by as I called the tech departments at both the old company and the new company every week, sometimes many times a day. I basically had only my old flip phone, which was a prepaid phone (on yet a third phone service), and I was using up a lot of my minutes calling “toll-free” numbers at my landline and smartphone companies. Somewhere in here I was able to make calls from my smartphone, but could not receive calls. And then I couldn’t make calls from the smartphone either.

            Eventually, I found a tech at the old company who saw that the problem involved multiple computer systems that were getting incompatible messages, and no human being had noticed, despite my constant calls to them that SOMETHING wasn’t working.

            In the middle of this process, a friend asked why I was putting myself through such agita—it was all I could talk about for weeks. “It’s just a phone number,” she said. But I was stubborn. We had had the same phone number for 46 years. Losing my husband and my phone number in the same year was just not acceptable. So I persevered.

            And finally, finally, finally, the transfer of number was complete. (There is a downside to having an old landline number. All those robocall companies have that number, and I get many scam calls. But it’s still the same number that Jack knew. In case he ever wants to call me from, wherever.)

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I’m participating in the 12th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

SOL6: Why I (Sometimes) Hate Technology

            I’m going to Connecticut on Saturday to meet a fellow group of New York Mets fans for our annual preseason get-together to hope for better things than last year and play trivia. Because my usual subway stop will be closed this weekend, I thought it would be easier to buy my train ticket online in advance.

            I have the MTA eTix app on my phone, so I clicked on it, and after clicking on my starting station and destination station, a pop-up window told me the app is out-of-date and I should click on Install Now.

           Clicking on that button, however, just gets me the generic App Store, and when I search for MTA eTix, I get a No Results message. Hmmm.

            Maybe I could get it on my laptop? The laptop finds the MTA eTix app in the App Store, but doesn’t let me download it because it’s only for the iPhone. Hmmm.

            But if I go to the App Store app on my phone and search MTA eTix, I find it easily. Now why couldn’t the original app’s link to the App Store take me to that latest version of the MTA eTix app? And why couldn’t the App Store that link went to find the MTA eTix app?

            Technology: it drives you crazy when it isn’t giving you the greatest pleasure.

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I’m participating in the 12th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

SOLTuesday: Telephone Hold Limbo

            This morning I spent at least half an hour with a phone plugged into my ear.

            I had to call the Transit Authority about a reduced fare Metrocard I lost a couple of weeks ago, and which I had reported lost a couple of weeks ago. I looked up the number online and dialed what I thought was the right number.

            Of course, I first had to go through the routine recording “as our menus have recently changed,” until I got to the part where I could say “representative” and get into the hold queue. The music wasn’t bad, at first, interrupted maybe every 15 seconds by the recording apologizing for the wait time, but after a while I realized it was only a two-bar riff, repeated endlessly, and it became boring quickly.

            Fortunately, with a cellphone, it’s possible to be on hold and do other things, so I spent this 15 minutes doing necessary stretches. However, when I finally reached a human being, explained my problem (had my replacement Metrocard been mailed?), and learned I wasn’t in her system, it turned out I had called the wrong number. I should have called a city number: 511.

            Dialing 511, however, got me a recording saying it wasn’t a valid number. WTF?!

            Next I tried the all-purpose 311. The recording here misunderstood the reason for my call and sent me to a lost and found person. (Not too long a wait on hold.) She started to tell me how I could go to the website, and when I said I’d rather speak to a human, she laughed and said she was supposed to tell me all my options. She successfully switched me to the 511 number.

            After a brief hold here, I learned that there’d been a “backlog” in replacement cards and mine wasn’t even ready to be mailed yet. (Internal scream of exasperation. With reduced fare, I can only get one round-trip card at a time when showing my Medicare card. This is beyond annoying.)

            Well, if it hasn’t been mailed yet, where is it mailed from? I ask. From lower Manhattan, he says. Can I come pick it up then? Yes, he says. He’ll put a hold so it won’t be mailed out, and I will be called and left a voicemail when it is ready. That should save a couple of days in the Post Office.

            All of this took only half an hour, but it disarrayed my whole morning.

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SOL: Today's adventures in Telephoneland

Act I: I call Time Warner first. From Will the phone techie, I learn that while Time Warner still has my phone number, it is no longer active. He said that the original request from Credo to port over, i.e., transfer, my number had been canceled when it wasn't completed in time. So Credo will have to request the transfer again. BUT a transfer can only be made of an active number. So I have to reactivate my phone account with Time Warner, and that itself takes about 20 minutes because the customer service person sort of insisted on finding me the best-priced bundle, and then she has to send me through a "third-party" recording to verify that I'm who I say I am, am authorized to change my plan with Time Warner, and lots more questions.

Act II: I call Credo, where I get yet another techie, named Kenny. I tell him that Credo has to resubmit its request to port over the number. He tells me that Time Warner had called Credo earlier in the day (before my call to Time Warner chronicled above) to ask, "Why are you billing this number when the number belongs to Time Warner?" When told that Credo had been asked to port over the number, Time Warner says, "Expire the request, the customer wants to stay with Time Warner." This is BEFORE I had called Time Warner today. Just want to make that clear. And I do not want to stay with Time Warner

Intermission: I have lunch with Susan and Dozie at Sookk, a nice Thai place on Broadway.

Act III: In my e-mail after lunch is one from Time Warner "confirming" a service visit on Thursday about a digital phone. I have no idea what this is about, but it's a good thing I call to ask, because then I learn that while the woman I talked to at Time Warner earlier in the day had reactivated my phone number, the reactivation won't be final until Thursday. So Credo cannot submit a request to port over my number until at least Thursday. The service call was to connect my phone, but since all I need is to see the phone light on the modem light up, I won't need a service call for that. (So this guy says.)

Act IV: I call Credo again to report that they can't submit a request for porting over the number until it is really a live number on my end. Justin, the techie on this call, tells me my problem is rare; he has only seen it once before. He also has an ingenious theory about what happened: when the porting over looked done, Time Warner immediately released my number, but in fact the porting over wasn't done. So when Time Warner saw that it wasn't complete, it took back the number, but then the number existed in both places, which isn't supposed to happen. So Justin thinks the number got stuck in a recurring loop in which the porting over starts, Time Warner cuts out, then takes back the number when it sees the porting over hasn't completed. AND when I first asked to have my number transferred, I was supposed to have been assigned a temp number, so that when my number was ported in to Credo, it would replace the temp number. Now I have been assigned a temp number, which I don't want to use because I don't want anyone to think that this is my number.

Epilogue: I am waiting for the phone icon to light up on Time Warner's modem -- hopefully this will happen on Thursday -- and then I will call Credo and start this porting process all over again. Will it work this time? your favorite cliche.

SOLSC Day 16: Bookkeeping, Part II

A week ago, I wrote a Slice about two sets of hospital doctors' bills for my husband — one set I’d paid last month, and the second set, 10 pages long, including both the old charges and new ones. A friendly woman in the hospital’s billing office said she would send me an amended statement for only the new charges.

            On Monday, I received two statements, one nine pages long, the other 12 pages. Again, each statement contained charges I know I’ve paid. Today, I went through all four statements, marking the charges I’ve paid, adding up the charges I haven’t. The total was about $30 less than either of the amounts on the statements I got a couple of days ago.

            So once again, I called the hospital’s billing office and talked to another friendly woman. She had an explanation that made no sense to me for why the check I’d sent hadn’t been applied to two of the doctors’ charges. I kept trying to understand, she kept repeating her “explanation.” In the end, I decided to stop arguing and just say I would send a check for the amount I think I owe, and she laughed and conceded that there was some problem with the way payments were applied to charges.

            These are the kind of life details that are so boring and so annoying. Yet they also became a test of attitude. Shall I become angry and obsessed over some weird computer glitch, or just pay what I think I owe and let the problem roll off my back? I am following path #2, and I feel much better.